The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing the same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time and space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of infinity. This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established institution in human life, and infinity is not. No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over them. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably employed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured policeman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets. The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough. Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it beautiful. Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another way--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to make it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new religion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars, its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the past. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests' wilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.